Lavender An Overture --for some little girl A text message comes in. "re: the work. how''s it going?" I''m on the couch hunched over my phone, thumbing a reply to my text-only therapist while my kids throw each other around the room. I look down at my phone in my hands, my hands in my lap. I realize I''m like a folding chair. You can take me anywhere, shake me open then shake me closed again. I ask, "What work do you mean?" I wait. Ping.

"Self-care." Oh. I type, "I don''t have any time for that." I wait. Ping. "But what do you practice for self-care?" the therapist asks again. What did I say that she''s not getting? "I run," I say. "I sleep.

I drink wine. I write. I read." "Which of those things feeds your soul?" I don''t like that word. It immediately tells me something. I type, "Writing. Reading, I guess?" But that''s the work I get paid for. Is that the work we mean? What if self-care isn''t an activity, monetized or otherwise.

What if it''s a state of being? It occurs to me I should''ve said, a clean surface. Clean surfaces feed my soul. There are no clean surfaces in my world anymore. Something is always overlapping something else, touching someone else--toys on the floor, feet on the toys; drawings on the desk, grocery lists on the drawings. My work is picked up then put down/picked up then put down. Someone is always in my lap/reaching for my lap/leaving my lap until the work has become about laps, lapping, overlap. I look down at my body again. I''m so awfully folded.

And when I say lap, I mean one portion of a complete person--integral to the whole but inferior on its own. When I say lap, I mean luck, as in, it just fell into my lap. But none of these things make any difference. In the middle of laughing/fighting my children ask for milk, a snack. A diaper needs to be changed. One starts to sing and the other says, "Stop it!" because that''s pretty much all he says these days. I text, "What do you really mean by soul?" Uh oh. Here I go again.

I wait. In the preschool TV series Daniel Tiger''s Neighborhood, Daniel reminds us that "when you wait you can play, sing, or imagine anything," so in my mind I replay an On Point podcast. Self-care isn''t, psychologist Sarah Pollak purrs, a podcast. Nor is it a mani-pedi. It''s not a lavender-scented bubble bath or a cocktail with egg white in it. It''s not a massage or a pulp novel by a pool. It''s all about breath, about waiting to calm down, about stepping away from your routine for a moment, about recognizing your selfhood in the middle of a break down. So, I guess self-care is documentation? A monk''s job in the old days was to illuminate.

That''s the kind of work I''d be into, spending afternoons in fields not speaking only thinking, or busy brewing beer or making perfume in redolent barns with high dusty ceilings. And mornings are for bending over a holy book, drawing weird little monsters in the margins. But I''m doomed to be a nun. I suppose nuns worked to document instead the domestic minutia of their schools and cloisters and Magdalene laundries. No one in their right mind would leave the important stuff to them, the Romanesque and benedictional, the iconographies of the rapture, the soul, in other words, how it perches in the divine offices of the magisterial skyscraper. No, theirs is the humble hearth God takes the train home to. He''s worked so hard at making souls all day and what have the nuns been doing? Writing in their journals. Telling poor village girls what to do.

Where are the filigrees and arabesques? Where are the gold-leaf, anthropomorphized lionesses? Of course, I''m probably oversimplifying. Who the hell knows what nuns do except nuns? Ping. "I guess a soul is what makes you you." Ugh. I decide to let this response hang for a minute, and as I do I begin to notice the shape of my body again, how I curl into myself, how my body has begun to resemble dated furniture, still functional but fusty--my roll-top shoulders, the desk of my lap. If I pulled open my drawers, there''d be letters inside them. Dear Me, Forget it. Love, Me.

Or there would be stacks and stacks of half-filled diaries: Monday: He''s sleeping all day again, off and on, so . Tuesday: I was thinking I''d-- I finally write back, "I think I''m losing my mind," which is, to be fair, overly dramatic. But where did I leave off and what am I even working on? Oh yeah. Documentation. And who would care enough to call it work, the stu I do hunched over a laptop or sprawled out on a gallery oor with my thread and box of needles? After weaving the fates of men, did the Fates ever get the recognition they deserved? It must be difficult to work that hard at a task people hate you for.